Legendary.






I'll definitely be ordering pizza for dinner tonight -- and paying with bitcoins, of course.

Happy Bitcoin Pizza Day, everyone!

All of the FATF member countries are becoming hyper-regulated, not just Singapore. The US and the EU are becoming draconian too.

I'd say that anyone using any centralized exchange should expect anything from invasive AML/KYC to frozen funds, account closures or outright exit scamming. The root of the problem is that people trust exchanges not to do these things.


I'm confident that Gemini, Coinbase and many others are closing accounts in similar cases. They usually aren't stupid enough to say why.

About a year ago, there was a very similar case with Bitfinex.

It is overreach, but I think it would be naive to deny this is the direction things are headed. This is actually one of the reasons I prefer ChipMixer to CoinJoins. The latter are too obvious on-chain, at least when using popular methods like Wasabi Wallet.


I fully agree, but I also think it's worth pointing out. Binance buried themselves in the Seychelles rather than a more respectable jurisdiction for good reason.

The theory is based on research published by Sergio Demián Lerner. Here is some background:




The evidence is fairly convincing, but I wouldn't consider the theory bulletproof.

This is something worth clarifying. Binance Singapore is a fiat exchange that only has a handful of listed markets. When this happened, CZ strongly implied that something like this would only occur on Binance's "regulated" exchanges, and not on Binance.com.

At the time, a new Singapore law subjecting cryptocurrency exchanges to existing financial regulations was about to come into effect. Binance was either applying or about to apply for a license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. This likely had an impact. The MAS's language about the need for exchanges to implement "activity-based" and "risk-focused" mitigations strongly echoes the FATF's AML model.

I'm not happy about it, but it should come as no surprise when regulated fiat exchanges avoid doing business with "risky" customers. That's their prerogative. We've seen what can happen when exchanges flout money laundering regulations.

Indeed, it's a great example of the difficulties underlying in-wallet fee estimation. BitMEX has the power to drastically alter the fee market, and it's impossible to anticipate exactly how large their load will be or what fees they will use.

In regards to casual users, the only immediate solution is to encourage the use of RBF, and wallets that support it.

The community putting pressure on BitMEX to at least implement broadcast delays could also help. Dumping all those transactions in a 2-minute window everyday is just horribly inefficient.

I expected Craig Wright to take credit for the transaction. As a matter of fact, the inputs came from an address he claims to own. However, he is denying any involvement:

We're talking about two different things. I was referring to the difficulty adjustment in 2.5 days. If the adjustment happened today, it would be -1.21%. Indeed, it looks like the difficulty drop may be larger than the 1-2% I expected. 10% would be a stretch, though.

Things never change.

I remember people asking the same question 5 years ago, frantically waiting for some app to come along that would accelerate adoption. Services and interoperable protocols will continue to be built on top, but they'll always be sideshows to Bitcoin's native value proposition. As far as adoption goes, Bitcoin sells itself -- no marketing or "killer app" needed. It's the hardest form of money ever known. That's why people and institutions are buying it.

I'm not aware of any other businesses doing that -- and certainly not at BitMEX's scale. Exchanges generally allow withdrawals on demand.

It's been a predictable daily event for years now. I can't count the number of times I've had to race or bump fees to beat their morning flood of withdrawals. They are a plague on the network.

The hash rate is declining but the drop has been fairly modest. Difficulty is still technically slated to increase in 4 days, although it will probably become a modest (1-2%) decrease by then. It may take 2 difficulty adjustments for the fee market to normalize, but I see no cause for concern.

Fees have also been driven up by increased exchange activity recently, which usually coincides with boosts in price.

By the way, I strongly recommend Johoe's mempool viewer over Earn.com. 110-120 satoshis/byte is likely to get next block confirmation at this time despite what Earn.com says.

The other side of this misconception: "The hash rate will crash." Lots of people believe that if the average cost to mine a bitcoin becomes greater than the price, hash rate must drop to account for it.

The truth is that not all miners have the same cost -- not by a long shot. The industry is increasingly moving towards efficient grid use that allows for extremely low energy costs. Here is one example. Mining efficiency also plays a major role. Smaller miners with higher electricity costs and those running inefficient miners like S9s are shutting down, but more efficient operations are also coming online.

Since the halving about 32 hours ago, the network has seen one block every 10.38 minutes. That's slightly below the target time and the previous rate, but certainly doesn't indicate the 30-35% drop predicted by BitMEX Research or many other hash rate pessimists.

That's not actually Forbes, just someone on its contributor network. He is also just citing the same Wall Street Journal story in the OP.

I don't see any reason not to believe it, though. The WSJ isn't exactly known for fake news. Bitcoin is obviously gaining legitimacy as an investment asset, and Coinbase and Gemini are also very compliance minded, with licenses in every state they operate where it's required. It wouldn't be a surprise to see big banks working with them.

Less savory Bitcoin companies probably shouldn't anticipate the same caliber of banking relationships anytime soon.

Block generation sped up overnight. Now we've seen 135 blocks in 1365 minutes, which is just over 10 minutes per block.


The difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks. It's only "automatic" as long as miners keep mining.

Did you catch the message F2Pool put in the coinbase of #629999?



It certainly feels historical to me! After all these years, we have really come full circle, haven't we?

2009: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"
2020: "NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed's Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue"

The price is already high enough for bitcoins to be worth mining. It's just a matter of which mining operations we're talking about.

The number of miners will probably decrease, but the hash rate -- that's less of a sure thing, and didn't happen in 2016.

Inefficient miners will shut down, but efficient miners may actually be adding hash rate. Until the next difficulty adjustment comes, I don't want to make any big assumptions.

Well played, F2Pool. Every Bitcoin user has got to have some appreciation for this.

Governments won't stop debasing their currencies -- Bitcoin unaffected.

Happy halving day everyone!

I assumed the margin wouldn't be high from looking at the order book. I wonder more about the volume one can expect.


Perhaps, but the fundamental value of having minimal base layer functionality is that it insulates Bitcoin from attacks on the upper layers. There is always an implicit security trade-off when you use an off-chain or sidechain mechanism because they aren't secured by the Bitcoin mainchain consensus. We should keep that in mind when considering the value these upper layers represent, especially in their early alpha/beta phases.

Is there any recent discussion of how much JoinMarket makers can expect to earn? It's crossed my mind, but I'd like to gauge the expected gains vs. the risk of keeping private keys online.


I would love to see that. Chances are that the sidechain would end up holding very little value, commensurate with the mining security. There's no point attacking a worthless chain.

Nobody really cares about the viability of sidechains. Unlike Bitcoin, miners don't have strong incentives against attacking them.


Just like merge-mined altcoins, the only people who would care are holders of the altcoin. The Bitcoin mainnet doesn't care. That's why it's easier -- miners can openly attack the sidechain without anybody really caring.

BTC.com colluded in a 51% attack on Bitcoin Cash last year. As one of the largest Bitcoin mining pools, their reputation doesn't seem to have suffered all that much.

More than trying to recover the money, this is likely about Bitfinex trying to distance themselves from this:


I don't think they really believe the money is recoverable. What does subpoenaing the banks achieve? The big problem is that law enforcement agencies -- including the US Department of Justice -- seized the money. Even if Bitfinex could prove ownership of funds within Crypto Capital's tangle of shell companies, they will have a hard time proving the money was not involved in criminal activity.

The problem is that it's now impossible to filter for local traders, and there is no way to search the "terms of trade" sections. I gave up trying to randomly search through offers since the chances of finding cash traders who were also local and listed contact info was incredibly low.

And when it comes to purely online trades, the incentive to use their escrow service is really high due to fraud. For these reasons, I think that trading outside the escrow system is rare.

I really miss the old LocalBitcoins. It used to work just like Craigslist, with lots of people using it for local listings while dealing P2P outside of escrow. There's nothing "local" about it anymore. I've since moved on to LocalCryptos. It's nowhere near as active as the old LBC, but I managed to make one cash trade recently -- for a good price too.